Category: aging

Red sand passes through hourglass bulbs.

Outlive by Peter Attia: A Book Review

Bobby Stroup Leave a comment

By Bobby Stroup

If you want to read a book about how to guarantee a 100-year lifespan, Peter Atta’s Outlive is going to disappoint you. But if you want to learn about Medicine 3.0, the four horsemen diseases, and how you might increase your healthspan, then you should get a copy of the book today. 

Outlive is not a book on public health policy so much as it is an exploration of personal health policy. Even so, the text — existing somewhere between the genres of autobiography and medical journal anthology — offers insights relevant to any health care aficionado. Read More

Health visitor and a senior woman during home visit.

Caring for Patients with Serious Illness: Insights from Kristofer Smith

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Kristofer Smith, MD, MPP is the Chief Medical Officer of Landmark Heath, where he oversees efforts to establish a high-quality and clinically effective home-based medical care model for patients with serious illness.

We sat down with Dr. Smith to discuss his experience caring for patients with serious illness and developing programs to provide health care at home, among other topics. The following interview has been edited and condensed. Read More

Cover image of Ashley Shew's book, Against Technoableism.

Symposium Introduction: Addressing Technoableism: Reforming Infrastructure and Disability Representation

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ashley Shew

Far too often, when people write and talk about technology and disability, stories are deeply shaped by ableism. Often when devices are painted as “solving the problem of disability” or “empowering disabled people,” they suggest that being disabled is itself a problem, and that people should try to be as nondisabled as possible. But pretending to be nondisabled is not a great way to live — to be in hiding or denial, to not give your body and mind the rest they deserve, to hurt yourself trying to live up to expectations and infrastructure sometimes literally designed to keep you out. Technology itself gets painted as heroic and important — and, please, investors, throw more money at the tech industry — when any disability is mentioned. Disability is often appealed to as a justification for technological development, and as a moral imperative toward investment in technological research. This is technoableism as I describe it in my book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. 

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Legal Preparedness for Aging and Caregiving

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Sharona Hoffman

During 2013 and 2014, I endured a very difficult 18 months. Both of my parents died, my mother-in-law died, and my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55. As I went through all of this, I learned a great deal about getting older, getting sick, facing the end of life, and caregiving. As a result of my personal experiences and my professional background as a Professor of Law and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, I wrote a book called Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow.

The book addresses many legal, financial, medical, social, and other support systems for aging and caregiving. In this article, I discuss the legal documents that every American adult should have. These documents can help ensure that your finances and health care are well-managed as you age and that your wishes will be followed after death.

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Abstract glitch with word SCAM on 100 Dollar bill. Concept art for Online scam.

Rethinking Senior Scams?

James Toomey Leave a comment

By James Toomey

Many people, including, it seems, most advocates for law reform, assume that older adults are uniquely vulnerable to scams, and indeed that senior scams are a unique social problem demanding a unique legal solution. But in “The Age of Fraud” (forthcoming in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, winter 2023), about which I’ve blogged here before, I reported the results of an empirical study suggesting that, in fact, younger adults were as much as three times more likely to engage with scammers during the first year of the COVID pandemic than older adults.

One possible implication of this finding — if indeed it is generalizable — which I discuss but don’t commit to in the paper, is that more people are more vulnerable to scams — and the polished tactics of psychological manipulation used by scammers — than has been generally appreciated. But if scams are not a bounded problem of those who are in some sense more psychologically vulnerable (as older adults are thought of in, at least, the popular imagination), we might want to rethink scams — what they are, how we fight them, and how we treat and think about their victims.

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London, England, UK, January 22nd 2022, Long covid symptoms sign on pharmacy shop window UK.

Mobilizing Long COVID Awareness to Better Support People with Acquired Disabilities

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Marissa Wagner Mery

Long COVID exposes an often-unacknowledged facet of disability: that one is far more likely to develop a disability than be born with one.

Estimates suggest that, at present, approximately 10 – 20 million Americans are now afflicted with the array of debilitating symptoms we now call Long COVID, which include fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive dysfunction or “brain fog.”

The upswell of advocacy and awareness around Long COVID should be mobilized to call attention to and address the challenges faced by newly-disabled adults, particularly with respect to employment.

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Person in nursing home.

Struggles Over Care Will Shape the Future of Work

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Andrew Milne

The future of work will largely be the future of care work. Health care is rapidly becoming the largest employer in the U.S., expanding to serve the fastest growing demographic, aging seniors. As a lawyer for seniors in need of free legal services, I see my clients struggle to access care made scarce by the for-profit care industry’s understaffing and underpaying of workers attempting to meet the growing need. The future of work and of aging will be shaped by struggles over care from both giving and receiving ends, perhaps against those profiting in between.

Recall that the first COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. spread between nursing homes. These facilities, like most nursing homes, are for-profit businesses that pad their margins by cutting labor costs. The resulting understaffing has deadly effects in normal times. The pandemic intensified those effects, as underpaid care workers, forced to work at multiple facilities to survive, unintentionally spread the virus between facilities.

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Top view of white cubicles in modern office with white walls and carpeted floor. 3d rendering.

Managing Cognitive Decline Concerns in the Workplace

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Sharona Hoffman

As the American population ages, employers must contend with the growing challenge of cognitive decline in the workplace.

Cognitive decline becomes more common as individuals age. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease doubles every five years after age 65, and almost one-third of people over 85 have the disease. And, as detailed in my book, Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow, the American population is aging. By 2034, about 77 million people will be seniors, accounting for 21% of U.S. residents.

Additionally, many professionals work past retirement age. For example, over 31% of physicians are over 60, and 15% of attorneys are over 65. The average age of federal judges is 69.

Considered together, these trends substantiate concerns about the increasing prevalence of cognitive decline in the workplace. Recent research provides further support: when Yale New Haven Hospital tested clinicians on staff who were seventy and older, it found that almost 13% had significant cognitive deficits.

Older employees often bring a wealth of experience and highly refined skills to their jobs. They can therefore add great strength to the workforce. Yet, employees with cognitive decline can cause a multitude of complex challenges in the workplace. They can threaten workplace productivity, workforce morale, and even public safety.

How might employers address cognitive decline concerns? As I argue in my article “Cognitive Decline and the Workplace” (forthcoming in the Wake Forest Law Review), there are several options, but many are legally and ethically problematic.

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